Positive Sinking

Freaking Out the Pre-frosh

i was wondering, how long does it take u to come up with this stuff? does this stuff in all actuality pass through your head on a regular basis??

-- curious miss

Well, you know, it greatly varies... sometimes I am a fertile field of ideas blossoming all over the place, but all too often I am a barren wasteland of nothing except for bits of trash blowing in the wind over the hot sand of my imagination.

When important stuff is happening on campus, such as CPW (Hi, pre-frosh!), it’s easier to come up with stuff. In fact, in the spirit of Campus Preview Weekend, I think I’m going to sing a song. Well, not really a song, more like a prose song which doesn’t have a melody to it... ok, fine, a column.

What to do during CPW

Sleep naked -- Hey, this might be the one time this year you’ll actually have someone else willingly sleeping in your room. You better take advantage of it... who knows when the opportunity may knock again? I know, I know, they’re young, innocent, and not the right gender, but hey, isn’t pickiness why random people aren’t sleeping in your room on a regular basis to begin with?

Eat free food -- Who knows, maybe after x years at the Institvte you still might have that bushy-eyed-bright-tailed look to you which identifies most pre-frosh from unnaturally aged MIT students. Just put a bewildered look on your face and next thing you know all the living groups, fraternities, and dorms will be throwing steak and lobster at you. It’s better than a career fair, because you can’t actually eat free t-shirts... well, you can, it just takes some effort and a large vat of boiling water. Syrup helps too, but that’s optional.

Interbreed the pre-frosh -- Pre-frosh have the sexual drive of a horny rabbit hocked up on Viagra. They’re like virtual pets, you remember those? You can lock up your pre-frosh with someone else’s pre-frosh and see how many little pre-frosh emerge. Just remember to feed them, otherwise the next time you look at your keychain they’ll all have their little nerdy feet in the air with big x’s for eyes. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?

Go on an MIT tour -- And make sure you ask lots of annoying questions. You know, like “Wait, are those crying sounds I hear?” or “If you’re so cool, how come you go to MIT?” If you’re feeling especially mean, you can ask “Doesn’t Harvard have that? Except better?” Go wild. Making the parents in the crowd uncomfortable is always a plus, too.

Hit on pre-frosh -- Hey, they’re people too. Just small people who haven’t taken multi-variable calculus yet. And, you know, there’s like a 75 percent chance that they’ll be around in September, so you can look for true love or live life dangerously... depending on what turns you on (besides light switches). Besides, they didn’t travel all the way to Boston just to hear about the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, if you get my drift.

Switch identities with a pre-frosh-- And I don’t mean “just for the weekend,” if you’re going to do it, then go whole hog. If you’re a senior, then your pre-frosh can get their MIT degree in just a matter of a month! Who could turn that down? And you can return back to wherever the hell they’re from, go to prom (I mean, seriously, wouldn’t you love to relive prom?), and enjoy a carefree summer before heading off to DeVry University. And if you switch with a pre-frosh of opposite gender, you could cross-dress! It’s the best of both worlds.

So this one time, Andy Newman sent this e-mail to sinking@mit.edu and a giant moth came out of the ground and bit his head off. I swear. Are we there yet?